If you’ve read SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and want more, or you’ve read my other basic guides to SEO and want more - this Advanced Guide To SEO is for you. If you’ve already mastered the basics of SEO like writing title tags, the basics of link building or data research on the web and want more - this guide is for you! It’s for anyone looking to take their success on the web to the next level; bloggers, business owners, eCommerce and even affiliate marketers. This guide provides you with dozens and dozens of things you can sit down and do right now to improve your traffic from organic search on the web.
Depending on your budget, your goals, your timelines, and many other variables, your go-to digital marketing strategies probably use services like pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), social media, or maybe e-mail marketing. (If you are interested in learning more about any of those services, we have digital marketing experts that you can contact to get started today!)
View count: View count is the number of times your video has been viewed — also referred to as reach. This metric is great to track if your goal is to increase brand awareness and have your content seen by as many people as possible. However, it’s important to remember that every video hosting platform measures a view differently. For example, a view on YouTube is 30 seconds while a view on Facebook is only 3 seconds. Be sure to read the fine print before reporting on your video view count.
Disney initially stated they wouldn’t exceed one million in donations, but ended up donating two million after the campaign blew up. #ShareYourEars campaign garnered 420 million social media impressions, and increased Make-A-Wish’s social media reach by 330%. The campaign is a powerful example of using an internet marketing strategy for a good cause. #ShareYourEars raised brand awareness, cultivated a connected online community, and positively affected Disney’s brand image.
Conversion rate optimization is still possibly one of the most underutilized but critical functions of digital marketing. Every element of digital marketing is useless without considering conversion rates. This goes for SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email, and Display. The power of your SEO rankings are only as good as your click through rates and your traffic is only valuable of your website and landing pages foster some type of “action.” Why spend all the time and energy driving traffic through multiple different channels if you are not willing to spend the time and energy on conversion optimization? Yet many brands and agencies still put less emphasis on this crucial piece of the puzzle.
With brands using the Internet space to reach their target customers; digital marketing has become a beneficial career option as well. At present, companies are more into hiring individuals familiar in implementing digital marketing strategies and this has led the stream to become a preferred choice amongst individuals inspiring institutes to come up and offer professional courses in Digital Marketing.
Search algorithms are increasingly prioritizing web pages with video and videos now appear in 55 percent of Google keyword searches. Besides helping your website rank on relevant searches, videos also make your snippet (or the actual result listing content) bigger and more eye-catching, meaning searchers will likely see it before they see other results on the page.
Conduct searches using what you consider to be your most popular keywords. Judge the relevance based on your competition. If that search pulls up competitors and products that offer what you offer, then you may try to get a larger share of that market. If the search terms don't bring up similar products, change your terms to try to find more specific words that will be more profitable.
SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.[59] Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's placement, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day.[60] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.[61] In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO.
We recently published an infographic on how powerful video will become. But the future has already arrived. This has been a full-on video revolution year for marketers. According to Wyzowl statistics, 63% of businesses have started using video content marketing. Out of those 82% of businesses feel video marketing is an important part of their strategy. Video is progressing rapidly and will reach new heights sooner than we think. This trend is fueled by 83% of businesses believing that video marketing gives them a good ROI.

There’s obviously a huge number of reasons why a website might link to another and not all of them fit into the categories above. A good rule of thumb on whether a link is valuable is to consider the quality of referral traffic (visitors that might click on the link to visit your website). If the site won’t send any visitors, or the audience is completely unrelated and irrelevant, then it might not really be a link that’s worth pursuing.

Digital marketing planning is a term used in marketing management. It describes the first stage of forming a digital marketing strategy for the wider digital marketing system. The difference between digital and traditional marketing planning is that it uses digitally based communication tools and technology such as Social, Web, Mobile, Scannable Surface.[57][58] Nevertheless, both are aligned with the vision, the mission of the company and the overarching business strategy.[59]
Marketing departments are the primary beneficiaries of SEM. By paying for certain keyword terms, they can drive inbound traffic to websites. SEM helps boost traffic by making products and services display more prominently given paid advertising. While website browsers may benefit from SEM by having products and services more easily brought to their attention, they also have to be on guard against website activity that is spurious or doesn’t address their needs.

Conversion rate optimization is still possibly one of the most underutilized but critical functions of digital marketing. Every element of digital marketing is useless without considering conversion rates. This goes for SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email, and Display. The power of your SEO rankings are only as good as your click through rates and your traffic is only valuable of your website and landing pages foster some type of “action.” Why spend all the time and energy driving traffic through multiple different channels if you are not willing to spend the time and energy on conversion optimization? Yet many brands and agencies still put less emphasis on this crucial piece of the puzzle.

Paid distribution, or paying money for the distribution of your videoExtended ArticlePaid Video Distribution: Why You Need It and How to Use ItYou survived your production cycle and created a spectacular video — now, what do you do with it? The answer, of course, is distribute… Read More via advertising, has become almost essential to the successful marketing of any video. Because most sites don’t charge for the use of their services (think Facebook or content sites like Buzzfeed), charging for distribution has become their one way of earning money — meaning video creators like you sometimes have to pay more to get your content seen by a wider audience.

In the section on preparing talent, we discussed how to record your script in short sections. If the editor were to stitch these sections together side-by-side, the subject’s face and hands might abruptly switch between clips. This is called a jump cut, and for editors, it poses an interesting challenge. Thankfully, this is where b-roll comes in handy, to mask these jump cuts.
Video can also provide social proof for your product or service. According to WebDam, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%. When creating video success stories focus on the story of your customer and the success he/she achieved from using your product/service. This nifty question template from Copyblogger will help you create awesome and human-focused video and written testimonials.

Look at your short- and long-term goals to choose whether to focus on organic or paid search (or both). It takes time to improve your organic search rankings, but you can launch a paid search campaign tomorrow. However, there are other considerations: the amount of traffic you need, your budget, and your marketing objectives. Once you’ve reviewed the pros and cons, you can select the search strategy that’s right for you.

A purchase may have been made, but there’s still a lot video can do to leverage the post-conversion stage of your flywheel. During the "delight stage" of the inbound methodology, your goal is to continue providing remarkable content to users that makes their interaction with your product or service as incredible as possible. It's also in hopes that they’ll tell their connections about their experience or up-sell themselves. Therefore, the goal of this type of video is encourage your customers to embrace your brand and become brand evangelists.
As digital marketing continues to grow and develop, brands take great advantage of using technology and the Internet as a successful way to communicate with its clients and allows them to increase the reach of who they can interact with and how they go about doing so,.[2] There are however disadvantages that are not commonly looked into due to how much a business relies on it. It is important for marketers to take into consideration both advantages and disadvantages of digital marketing when considering their marketing strategy and business goals.
Non-profit corporations and political entities use Internet marketing to raise awareness about the issues they address and engage individuals in their campaigns. They strongly favor social networking platforms because they are more personal than websites and they are easy to share, increasing the “viral” word-of-mouth effect that is so prevalent in online media.

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.[45]

But Google has championed machine learning as its future and seems 100 percent focused on growing this segment of the algorithm. Going forward, SEO practitioners will need to be proactive and invest in analyzing data and understanding search behavior across a variety of search and social platforms. This way they can develop the type of content that will motivate and influence user/search behavior which will in turn influence rankings and traffic.

Here’s the truth – only one site can be number one for a particular keyword, and there’s a lot of competition out there. But optimizing your site can make a difference to which site that is, as rankings fluctuate all the time. Plus, as long as you’re in the top 3, or at least on the first page, you’ve got a chance for people to find and click, which is what you want. If you deliver what they need after the click, that increases your chances of being relevant for future searches for that term.

The pre-production stageExtended ArticleEverything You Need to Know About Video Pre-ProductionPre-production is the first and one of the most important stages of the video production process. If you’re thinking of hiring a video production… Read More essentially covers all your video planning. It’s the first and most important stage of the production process because it sets your entire video in motion. At this stage, you’ll want to clearly define the content of your video, get feedback from all relevant team members, and start booking and scheduling your shoot. If you’re hiring a production team or agency, you’ll want to do all your company vetting, creative calls, and approvals here.

You may be wondering, why pay to show up in search engines and have people click on your website pages? Can’t you just improve your website’s SEO and get online visibility and organic clicks for free? The answer is that organic search isn’t actually free. SEO strategies are very beneficial to your business, but SEO takes time to take effect, (up to 6 months) and the tactics involve a lot of work toward producing quality content. With SEM/pay-per-click advertising, you see results right away, in the form of your business name on page one of a search.

One video is great, but the more often you post engaging video, the better. It may not be realistic to post videos every single day or for every single initiative, but if you’ve got a major campaign you’re working on or an initiative that would really benefit from video, dedicate some resources to video creation. Even overlaying text on a piece of stock footage can be highly engaging on your website and bring more visitors from organic search.
Many marketers like to compare organic SEO to public relations or “earned media” because there is no guarantee of success, making the ROI on earned media (including SEO) a challenge to predict and sometimes a challenge to measure. In both SEO and PR, marketers have the option of hiring internal staff, bringing in consultants, or using an outside agency. The same options apply for paid search marketing.

Your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of of your business. You need to build your marketing strategy around them. Step 1 of marketing is understanding what your customers want, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience. This chapter will walk you through (1) the process of building personal connections at scale and (2) crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.

When one of our clients wanted a video to explain the process of installing some HVAC equipment, we created this video to debunk a somewhat confusing process. Instead of continuously fielding the same questions about what to expect, how long the process would take, and any necessary preparations they needed to complete in advance, they decided an explainer video would be a more convenient and memorable way for clients to find and reference the answers to their questions.
White balance tells your camera the color temperature of the environment you’re shooting in. Different types of light have different colors. For example, incandescent bulbs (like what many people put in a lamp) have a very warm color. The florescent lights (if you’re reading this in an office, look up) are a little bit cooler. Daylight is cooler yet. Before you begin shooting, you have to adjust your camera’s white balance according to your setup.
A big part of what’ll dictate which analytics platform you should use will depend on your budget. If your company is super data rich and every department is highly dependent on accurate reporting, you might already invest in a robust paid platform that can meet your video needs. If not, there are tons of free tools you can use that are just as good as some of the bigger, paid-for options.
Publishing your video across all your owned channelsExtended ArticleHow to Distribute Your Video on Owned ChannelsIf you know content is king, you probably know distribution is queen. Creating amazing, engaging video content is difficult, but distributing it can be… Read More is probably the easiest way to distribute your video, and the one method that cannot be ignored. It includes every channel you own, like your website, PDFs, digital documents, email lists, ecommerce pages, apps, and more. These channels are the primary sources of information about your company and brand, so use every single one you can intelligently and with purpose.
With Bing Ads, your accounts are free to set up and billing is flexible. You choose between a prepay or postpay option, as well as various payment methods. If you are uncertain about anything, there is free help to answer your questions before activating your campaigns. You can also pause campaigns at any time. Remember, you’re not billed until someone clicks your ad.
This broad overview of each piece of the Internet marketing world gives students a firm foundation in the field to help them decide where their interests and talents fit the best. All designers should have an understanding of content creation, while all content specialists should have respect for the design process (See also Content Marketing Specialist). At the more advanced levels of a marketing program, students will hone the skills that are most important to their areas of emerging expertise to create sharp minds and strong portfolios on their way to the workplace.
The criteria and metrics can be classified according to its type and time span. Regarding the type, we can either evaluate these campaigns "Quantitatively" or "Qualitatively". Quantitative metrics may include "Sales Volume" and "Revenue Increase/Decrease". While qualitative metrics may include the enhanced "Brand awareness, image and health" as well as the "relationship with the customers".
A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
Let’s say, for example, that you run a construction business that helps with home repairs after natural disasters and you want to advertise that service. The official term for the service is “fire restoration,” but keyword research may indicate that customers in your area search instead for “fire repair” or “repair fire damage to house.” By not optimizing for these two keywords, you’ll lose out on a lot of traffic and potential customers, even if “fire restoration” is technically more correct.
"Convert" videos may include a webinar filled with tactical advice, product demos sent via email, landing page promotional videos, case studies, or more in-depth explainer and how-to videos. For example, while an "attract" video might provide a quick tip for nailing a sales pitch, a "convert" video could be an animated explainer video that breaks down the inbound sales methodology.
This guide is designed for you to read cover-to-cover. Each new chapter builds upon the previous one. A core idea that we want to reinforce is that marketing should be evaluated holistically. What you need to do is this in terms of growth frameworks and systems as opposed to campaigns. Reading this guide from start to finish will help you connect the many moving parts of marketing to your big-picture goal, which is ROI.